Sam teeters back slightly as if he was spat at. He takes a breath and shoves Tyrone’s shoulder. Tyrone retaliates with a punch in the stomach and Sam crumples to the ground.

The Grade 9 and 10 students at Cedarbrae Collegiate Institute in Scarborough are still groaning, which is good, because it means that they are paying attention. It means they might be ready with answers when the actors portraying Sam and Tyrone ask how this fight could have been avoided.

Mixed Company Theatre has been touring the play DISS and its gang-prevention message to schools across the Greater Toronto Area this spring. Since 1983, the troupe has travelled the world with its productions about diversity, peer pressure, sexual health, racism, drugs and violence. Their stories are always worst-case scenarios and, after each performance, the actors get audience members to re-enact scenes to change the outcomes.

But can watching theatre really deter youths from joining gangs? The Toronto Police Services Board thinks so, and gave the theatre company a $30,000 grant to create DISS.

Chalmers Award-winning playwright Rex Deverell, 69, wrote the play after consulting with youth in local communities. “We’ve been doing plays with street kids for quite a few years,” he says in an interview at St. Luke’s United Church near Carlton and Sherbourne streets where the troupe is rehearsing his next play, Project ACT.

“It’s always a case of listening hard, not only to their stories but to how they talk,” he says.

“The only way we’re going to get them to listen is to provide them something that interests them,” says Sgt. Jeff Pearson, coordinator for the police’s Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy (TAVIS). “What is interesting to youth is edgy. We provided [the students] with real-life situations — and it was the youth who provided the real-life solutions.”

It helps that some of Mixed Company Theatre’s actors used to lead what police might call “high-risk lifestyles.” Miguel Anthony, 29, who serves as the narrator, tells stories of “grand theft auto” when he was 14. Will Casey, 21, who plays Tyrone, says only that he was into “gang stuff.”

“We try to bring reality as much as possible to what is going on. If an audience senses some sort of mistruth — Boom! — they’ll shut the door,” says Duncan McCallum, the play’s 27-year-old associate director.

Sometimes, the reality gets the best of the students. At one school, a Grade 9 student said he wanted to change the scene’s outcome by walking away from a bully. But when the actor taunted him in front of 400 screaming spectators, the youth “exploded.”

“The kid, so overwhelmed by this moment, suddenly goes quiet and then leaps out and goes to hit,” McCallum explains. He grabbed the youth before he could strike the actor. “I said, ‘Your response as an audience yelling, ‘Fight, fight, fight,’ made this young boy feel like he had to respond.’ … These emotions are real, but let’s look at them and say, ‘Is that the choice we wanted to do?’ ”

Back at Cedarbrae, a girl broaches a hot subject: “Sometimes, it’s not right to snitch,” she says. Her comment is met by thunderous applause.

“Basically, what I’m hearing is we don’t talk,” Anthony says. “There’s this code of silence. That means that Tyrone and Jesse, they can walk around the school, around the community, instilling fear in people and bullying them by using aggression and we’re all OK with allowing these two guys to shut up our voices?”

The crowd murmurs.

After the play, a few students continue the conversation in the hall. You don’t snitch, you mind your own business, they say.

“What ever happened to treating people the way you want to be treated?” I ask.

One girl answers: “That was in Grade 3.”

“One show is not going to change the entire audience,” McCallum later says. “But if we can get one student to start thinking about choice, then that is change. If you can, empower the students to talk to each other, and support each other as a community. … Snitching is fear-mongering, but if the community comes together and says we’re not going to accept this then that’s a win on our part.